Google says DOJ’s proposal for breakup would harm U.S. in ‘global race with China’
CEO of Alphabet and Google Sundar Pichai meets Polish Prime Minister at the Chancellery in Warsaw, Poland on March 29, 2022.
Mateusz Wlodarczyk | Nurphoto | Getty Images
As Google heads back to the courtroom Monday, the company is arguing that the U.S. needs the company in its full form to take on chief adversary China and uphold national security in the process.
The remedies trial in Washington, D.C., follows a judge’s ruling in August that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago.
The Justice Department has called for Google to divest its Chrome browser unit and open its search data to rivals. Google said in a blog post on Monday that such a move is not in the best interest of the country as the global battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence rapidly intensifies. In the first paragraph of the post, Google named China’s DeepSeek as an emerging AI competitor.
The DOJ’s proposal would “hamstring how we develop AI, and have a government-appointed committee regulate the design and development of our products,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in the post. “That would hold back American innovation at a critical juncture. We’re in a fiercely competitive global race with China for the next generation of technology leadership, and Google is at the forefront of American companies making scientific and technological breakthroughs.”
Google is one of a number of U.S. tech companies trying to fend off the Trump administration’s antirust pursuits, most of which is held over from the Biden administration. Google lost a separate antitrust case last week, when a federal judge ruled Thursday that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers.
Meta is currently in court against the Federal Trade Commission, which has alleged that the company monopolizes the social networking market and shouldn’t have been able to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon also faces an FTC lawsuit for allegedly maintaining an illegal monopoly. And beyond antitrust, Trump’s FTC on Monday sued Uber, accusing the ride-hailing company of deceptive billing and cancellation practices tied to its subscription service.
It’s the type of enforcement actions the tech industry was hoping to avoid when President Trump took office in January. Google, Meta, Amazon and Uber — and top executives from some — publicly donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, part of a widespread corporate effort to cozy up to the incoming administration.
For Google, the search remedies trial will determine the consequences of the guilty verdict from August. The three-week trial will end on May 9. Judge Amit Mehta is expected to make his ruling in August, at which point Google plans to file an appeal.
“At trial we will show how DOJ’s unprecedented proposals go miles beyond the Court’s decision, and would hurt America’s consumers, economy, and technological leadership,” Mulholland wrote.
Google plans to argue that Chrome provides freedom. The browser helps people access the web, and its open source code is used by other companies. One of the DOJ’s proposals is that Google open its search data, such as search queries, clicks and results to other companies.
That would “introduce not just cybersecurity and even national security risks, but also increase the cost of your devices,” Google said.
A central part of Google”s challenge is to strike a balance between being seen as essential to American innovation, but not so essential that other companies can’t compete, particularly when it comes to AI.
Google will likely tout how it’s fueled AI innovation for years and will point to the “Transformers” research paper, which provided technical architecture used in AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity and Anthropic.
The DOJ has said that in search, “Google’s agreements continue to insulate Google’s monopoly.” The department plans to bring testimony from Nick Turley, ChatGPT’s head of product, and Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko.
In a blog post on Monday, Perplexity said that “the remedy isn’t breakup,” but rather that consumers should have more choice. The company said phone makers should be able to offer their customers an assortment of search options “without fearing financial penalties or access restrictions.”
“Consumers deserve the best products, not just the ones that pay the most for placement,” Perplexity wrote. “This is the only remedy that ensures consumer choice can determine the winners.”
WATCH: Google, Meta fight antitrust cases in same courthouse
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
WATCH: Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.
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